Reply to comment

To put in a brief word, comparing wild foxes and their treatment with the lives of actual human beings once owned as chattal seems something of a leap to me. As an American, and the descendant of slave owners, I can vouch that no such invidious comparisons were made during the history in question, far less in present times when the descendants of slaves themselves are rightfully outraged at any such parallels. These include equating the gay marriage joke to the Civil Rights Movement that so many of us actively engaged in during the sixties. The biggest problems in this debate as I see it, like all of history's conflicts of value, seem to involve the use of, meaning, and downright slipperiness of words themselves. The hermeneutics of conflicting world views have refused, and always stubbornly, to reach even a terminological consensus I vividly recall as a small boy, witnessing Bruce, my pet hanster, having his head methodically chewed off by Oswald, one of the family cats. I was deeply distressed and went to my father for comfort - which he readily gave. But when I asked why such things could be permitted to happen in a "fair" world, he replied with the traditional aphorisms: "Nature, red in tooth and claw"..."Nature inherently cruel"... "Nature sublimely indifferent to all suffering...and most disturbingly, "Without suffering there would BE no natural world and hence no US." Substitute the term "Biosphere" for "Nature" and such notions suddenly become respectable, even among extremists on both sides. And so, far from comprising that fragile, kindly, delicate entity we are taught to hold so dear, the "Biosphere," in the mind-boggling complexity of its workings - far beyond any mere human understanding, It has a much darker side. Suffering and death. Our own included, especially when our feelings of laudable compassion toward our dumb fellow sufferers come into play. The failure to show compassion toward animals has been proscribed for centuries in cultures including Hindu, Buddhist, Hebrew, Muslim and Christian. Rules for the humane slaughtering of beasts for food have been primary. Despite the fashion of using the human language of "rights" when discussing the suffering of animals, it is still quite fair to take note of our unique omnipotence of mind over them. This difference, despite early speculations by Darwin, is one of kind as well as degree. Because we inhabit our language, we are freed to dwell in the past as well as the future. This cannot be said of animals, even ignoring their manifest inability to reason. It is rightly held that the overwhelming percentage of suffering among animals takes place in the wild, with the majority of most species freezing or starving or being eaten before ever reaching adulthood. The very size and number of litters attests to a past and present of the extreme suffering required to survive genetically the fangs of natural selection. To take a less dour and humorless look at things, by far the greatest and most precipitous drop in the suffering of domesticated animals took place with the invention of the automotive transport. The size of this decrease in suffering draft animals was enormous compared with the totals that preceded it. Of course the more direct function of the decrease was the abrupt collapse of the equine population - far fewer horses/mules etc were brought into existence. Which brings up the profoundest conflict in worldviews between the two broad philosophical camps in opposition here. Is no life always prefereble to Life With-Suffering - an oxymoron - or even to Life-Causing-Inconvenience?? In this regard, it appears to me that a singular and radical historical fault line has appeared between what we used to call "Christendom" and the all-leveling, nationless, "Multicultural" global fantasy that's being shoved down our throats, especially in poor old Britain. Simply put, it's the fact that during Christendom, the individual was pitied because he had to die. In "Post-Christenndom" creatures are pitied for being born in the first place. My feeling in all this is that there's a far healthier dose and atmosphere of Puritan/Protestant sentiment among those lamenting the cruelty of fox hunting than they'd prefer to admit. There is a valid distinction to be made here between cruelty and sport. I would submit that in common parlance (to the extent that such an idea survives) the notion of inflicting some degree of pain or suffering and doing so without any enjoyment is not taken to mean cruelty - for example, the action of a judge who causes a felon to be caged up. Likewise, we would consider a judge whose secret passion is to meting out maximum sentences because he delights inwardly in causing the greatest possible pain to offenders - in not being on had for childhoods of their children, in the inevitable poverty or orphaning of their families - thus deprived of parents and bread-winners, etc. Our notion of cruelty seems directly to derive from some putative inner state (pleasure?) on the part of the perpetrator. This overwhelming concern was noted on the part of early 16th century Protestants. The Church had always preached out loudly against bear bating, expressly because of the annoyance, confinement, and pain of one of God's creatures, all of whom he took delight in. The Puritans cared nothing at all for the bear, and said so. They were apalled at the pleasure the crowd seemed to experience, to say nothing of the alcohol. One detects this same attitude of "godless puritanism run amok" in the wholly illogical attempt to forbid smoking among consenting adults and workers in bars and pubs, and those who agonize over deer hunting here in America where the creatures have become a major threat to gardens, crops and even their own healthy survival. Proposals to ban hunting and address the overpopulation blight by anaesthetising pregnant does and aborting their fauns became unpopular when it was discovered that they usually came out in one piece, struggled a lot for air before expiring, and tended to resemble Bambi. But seriously...For my part, I wonder why someone hasn't realized that the common house cats of the world, who permit me to share a home with them, probably inflict more grievous suffering on other creatures in a single week than all the rollicking and "elitist" fox chases of the past couple of centuries. Likewise for deer hunting on this continent - where there are many, many trees, everywhere, and where there's nothing like camping out with friends privately in the winter snow and making the cleanest shot, skinning, cleaning, roasting - all while enjoying the matchless evils of real Turkish tobacco and twelve-year-old ninety proof Bourbon. Puritanism (as modern generic) 1. the haunting midnight agony of knowing that somewhere, somehow, someone is laughing and having a good time, 2. knowing and despising the unacceptable inner climate of others (especially white males of European origin) -- but pardon gentles all. I was after all, "born in a half-savage country."